ABSTRACT
The currently dominant school of social mobility research has dug itself into a pit so deep and narrow that it has lost sight of what should undoubtedly be some of the principal themes in its field of investigation. But precisely because, women's mobility is inextricably bound up with their familial roles, the significance of the part they play remains equally central to a second principal theme. This is the importance of transgenerational family influences to individual mobility. The nature of transmission between generations within families has been an issue surprisingly neglected by sociologists. Men from middle-class families found opportunities in both public- and private-sector middle and upper management. With some families the disruption of the move was followed by downward mobility, as for the children of a senior India police manager who, on colonial independence, returned home—and also divorced. Equally strikingly, whether the mobility is upward or downward the association with divorce recurs with the family of marriage.
